The Saint vs Scotland Yard (13 page)

He was done in—finished. He must have been finished two
hundred
yards back. But as he reached the corner the ultimate
end came. His feet
blundered again, and he plunged as if a
trip-wire had caught
him across the knees. And then it must
have been the last
instinct of the hunted animal that made
him turn and reel
round into the little lane; and the Saint’s
strong arms caught
him as he fell.

The man stared up into the Saint’s face. His lips tried to
shape a
word, but the breath whistled voicelessly in his throat. And then his eyes
closed and his body went limp, and Simon
lowered him gently to
the ground.

The Saint straightened up again, and vanished once more
into the gloom. The slow
bleaching of the sky seemed only to
intensify
the blackness that sheltered him, while beyond the
shadows a faint light was beginning to pick out the
details of
the road. And Simon heard
the coming of the second man.

The footfalls were so soft that he was not surprised that he
had not
heard them before. At the moment when he picked
them up they could
only have been a few yards away, and to anyone less keen of hearing they would
still have been inaudi
ble. But the Saint heard them—heard the
long-striding ghostly
sureness of them padding over the macadam—and
a second
tingle of eerie understanding crawled over his scalp and
glis
saded down his spine like a needle-spray of ice-cold water. For the feet
that made those sounds were human, but the feet were
bare… .

And the man turned the corner.

Simon saw him as clearly as he had seen the first—more
clearly.

He stood huge and straight in the opening of the lane,
gazing
ahead into the darkness. The wan light in the sky fell
evenly across the
broad black primitive-featured face, and stip
pled glistening
silver high-lights on the gigantic ebony limbs.
Except for a loosely knotted loin-cloth he
was naked, and the
gleaming surfaces of his
tremendous chest shifted rhythmically
to
the mighty movements of his breathing. And the third and last thrill of comprehension
slithered clammily into the small
of
the Saint’s back as he saw all these things—as he saw the
savage ruthlessness of purpose behind the mere
physical pres
ence of that
magnificent brute-man, sensed the primeval lust
of cruelty in the parting of the thick lips and the glitter of the
eyes. Almost he seemed to smell the sickly stench
of rotting jungles seeping its fetid breath into the clean cold air of that
English dawn, swelling in hot stifling waves about
the figure of
the pursuing beast that
had taken the continents and the
centuries
in its bare-foot loping stride.

And while Simon watched, fascinated, the eyes of the negro
fell on
the sprawling figure that lay in the middle of the lane,
and he
stepped forward with a snarl of a beast rumbling in his throat.

And it was then that the Saint, with an effort which was as much
physical as mental, tore from his mind the steely tenta
cles of the
hypnotic spell that had held him paralysed for
those few seconds—and
also moved.

“Good morning,” spoke the Saint politely, but that was the
last
polite speech he made that day. No one who had ever
heard him talk had
any illusions about the Saint’s opinion of
Simon Templar’s
physical prowess, and no one who had ever seen him fight had ever seriously
questioned the accuracy of
those opinions; but this was the kind of
occasion on which the
Saint
 
knew
 
that
 
the
 
paths
 
of glory lead but
 
to
 
the
grave.
Which may help to explain why, after that single preliminary
concession
to the requirements of his manual of etiquette, he
heaved the volume over
the horizon and proceeded to lapse
from grace in no uncertain manner.

After all, that encyclopedia of all the social virtues, though
it had
some cheering and helpful suggestions to offer on the
subject of addressing
letters to archdeacons, placing Grand
Lamas in the correct relation of
precedence to Herzegovinian
Grossherz
ö
ge,
and declining invitations to open bazaars in aid
of Homes for
Ichthyotic Vulcaniser’s Mates, had never even
envisaged such a
situation as that which was then up for
inspection; and the
Saint figured that the rules allowed him a
free hand.

The negro, crouching in the attitude in which the Saint’s
gentle
voice had frozen him, was straining his eyes into the
darkness. And out of
that darkness, like a human cannon-ball,
the Saint came at him.

He came in a weird kind of twisting leap that shot him out
of the
obscurity with no less startling a suddenness than if he
had at
that instant materialised out of the fourth dimension.
And the negro simply
had no time to do anything about it.
For that suddenness was positively the
only intangible quality
about the movement. It had, for instance, a
very tangible
momentum, which must have been one of the most painfully
concrete
things that the victim of it had ever encountered.
That momentum started
from the five toes of the Saint’s left
foot; it rippled up
his left calf, surged up his left thigh, and
gathered to itself a
final wave of power from the big muscles
of his hips. And then,
in that twisting action of his body, it
was swung on into
another channel: it travelled down the
tautening fibres of
his right leg, gathering new force in every inch of its progress, and came
right out at the end of his shoe with all the smashing violence of a ten-ton
stream of water cramped down into the finest nozzle of a garden hose. And at
the very
instant when every molecule of shattering velocity and weight was concentrated
in the point of that right shoe,
the point impacted precisely in the geometrical
centre of the
negro’s
stomach.

If there had been a football at that point of impact, a rag of shredded
leather might reasonably have been expected to come
to earth somewhere
north of the Aberdeen Providential Society Buildings. And the effect upon the
human target, co
lossus though it was, was just as devastating, even if a
trifle less
spectacular.

Simon heard the juicy
whuck!
of his shoe making contact,
and saw
the man travel three feet backwards as if he had been
caught in the full
fairway of a high-speed hydraulic battering-
ram. The wheezy
phe-e-ew
of electrically emptied lungs merged
into the synchronised
sound effects, and ended in a little grunt
ing cough. And then
the negro seemed to dissolve on to the
roadway like a statue
of sculptured butter caught in the blast
of a superheated
furnace… .

Simon jerked open one of the rear doors of the car, picked
the
bearded man lightly off the ground, heaved him upon the cushions, and slammed
the door again.

Five seconds later he was behind the wheel, and the self-
starter
was whirring over the cold engine.

The headlights carved a blazing chunk of luminance out of
the dimness
as he touched a switch, and he saw the negro
bucking up on to his
hands and knees. He let in the clutch,
and the car jerked
away with a spluttering exhaust. One run
ning-board rustled in
the long grass of the banking as he
lashed through the narrow gap; and then
he was spinning
round into the wide main road.

Ten yards ahead, in the full beam of the headlights a uni
formed
constable tumbled off his bicycle and ran to the middle
of the
road with outstretched hands; and Simon almost gasped.

Instantaneously he realised that the scream which had
woken him
must have been audible for some considerable
distance—the
policeman’s attitude could not more clearly have
indicated a curiosity
which the Saint was at that moment
instinctively disinclined to meet.

He eased up, and the constable guilelessly fell around to the
side of the car.

And then the Saint revved up his engine, let in the clutch
again with
a bang, and went roaring on through the dawn
with the policeman’s
shout tattered to futile fragments in the
wind behind him.

Chapter II

It was full daylight when he turned into Upper Berke
ley Mews
and stopped before his own front door, and the door
opened even before he
had switched off the engine.

“Hullo, boy!” said Patricia. “I wasn’t expecting you for
another
hour.”

“Neither was I,” said the Saint.

He kissed her lightly on the lips, and stood there with his
cap tilted rakishly to the back
of his head and his leather coat
swinging
back from wide square shoulders, peeling off his
gloves and smiling one of his most cryptic smiles.

“I’ve brought you a new pet,” he said.

He
 
twitched open
 
the
 
door behind him, and she peered
puzzledly into
 
the back of the car. The passenger was still
unconscious,
lolling back like a limb mummy in the travelling
rug which
 
the
 
Saint had
 
tucked round him, his
white face
turned blankly to the roof.

“But—who is he?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said the Saint blandly.
“But for
the purposes of convenient reference I have christened him
Beppo. His shirt has a Milan tab on it—Sherlock Holmes
himself
could deduce no more. And up to the present, he
hasn’t been
sufficiently compos to offer any information.”

Patricia Holm looked into his face, and saw the battle glint
in his eye
and a ghost of Saintliness flickering in the corners of
his smile,
and tilted her sweet fair head.

“Have you been in some more trouble?”

“It was rather a one-sided affair,” said the Saint modestly.
“Sambo
never had a break—and I didn’t mean him to have
one, either. But the
Queensberry Rules were strictly observed.
There was no hitting
below belts, which were worn loosely
round the ankles——
”

“Who’s this you’re talking about now?”

“Again, we are without information. But again for the pur
poses of
convenient reference, you may call him His Beatitude the Negro Spiritual. And
now listen.”

Simon took her shoulders and swung her round.

“Somewhere between Basingstoke and Wintney,” he said,
“there’s
a gay game being played that’s going to interest us a lot. And I came into it
as a perfectly innocent party, for once
in my life—but I
haven’t got time to tell you about it now.
The big point at the
moment is that a cop who arrived two minutes too late to be useful got my
number. With Beppo in the back, I couldn’t stop to hold converse with him, and
you
can bet he’s jumped to the worst conclusions. In which he’s damned
right, but not in the way he thinks he is. There was a
phone box twenty
yards away, and unless the Negro Spiritual
strangled him first
he’s referred my number to London most of
an hour ago, and Teal
will be snorting down a hot scent as
soon as they can get him out of bed.
Now, all you’ve got to
know is this: I’ve just arrived, and I’m in
my bath. Tell the
glad news to anyone who rings up and anyone who calls;
and
if it’s a call, hang a towel out of the window.”

“But where are you going?”

“The Berkeley—to park the patient. I just dropped in to
give you
your cue.” Simon Templar drew the end of a ciga
rette red, and
snapped his lighter shut again. “And I’ll be
right back,” he
said, and wormed in behind the wheel.